The C-Suite Can See More of Procurement Now. It Trusts It Less.

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Economist Enterprise asked 2,648 C-suite executives about procurement this year, in a survey supported by SAP. Two of its findings belong together. Cost control is back on top: 54 percent of executives call it procurement’s primary contribution to the business, more than ten points higher than a year earlier. And confidence in procurement fell. Three in four executives are confident that procurement collaborates effectively, down from nine in ten a year earlier. Confidence in its influence over digital transformation fell to 68 percent, from 91. The report also says procurement’s place in corporate strategy declined markedly over the past twelve months, after trending upward since 2023.

SAP’s vice president of research for procurement and external workforce, writing about the findings, offers an explanation that deserves to be taken seriously, and he does not read the numbers as a retreat from procurement’s strategic importance. He writes that as AI opens up access to data across the organization, more stakeholders have the information to question decisions and demand clearer evidence of value. Taken at face value, that means the rest of the business is looking at procurement’s numbers more closely than before, and the confidence figures say it is coming away less convinced.

What the executives are looking at

Open the view a spend platform gives a CFO or a divisional president and, in my experience, what you see is what procurement recorded: the price paid against the price first quoted, the savings claimed on each contract, supplier risk scores, cycle times, and compliance with the preferred-supplier list. The savings line is the one procurement is measured on, and it is where the cost control that 54 percent of executives now value most shows up. Every item on that screen is a record of the buying.

What is usually missing is whether the thing that was bought did what the business case said it would. The platform could hold that field. It stays empty because nobody on the buyer’s side wrote the expected result down in a form a system could hold. Often the business case that justified the purchase came from the supplier, as a model handed across during the sale; I built many of those models myself. Procurement negotiated the price. The budget holder signed. After go-live the case went into a drawer, and the only figure that kept being updated was the savings line. So when visibility arrives, the record it reveals is a cost record, and an executive looking at it sees a function that can show what it saved and very little about what the business got for the money. It is not hard to see how that lowers the function’s strategic weight in their eyes.

Why savings cannot carry the function

Savings are real and they matter, and the 54 percent are not wrong to count them. The difficulty is that a saving is a claim about the price of an input, and the executive asking about procurement’s influence is asking about an output. In the boardroom the conversation moves past the discount quickly, to whether the operation runs faster, the margin moved, the risk came down and the program delivered. Procurement usually holds no record that answers it, so the answer gets built, after the fact, by whoever has the most to gain from a particular version of events.

The same survey shows where executives expect AI to sit. Only 9 percent want it leading most procurement decisions within three years; 46 percent expect a more limited role for it, supporting tactical work such as invoice automation while people keep strategic control. That is a sensible instinct, and it has a consequence the report does not draw. The people keeping control of the decisions are being asked, with better data every quarter, to show what those decisions produced, and the current record gives them little to show.

The record that changes the number

A better savings figure is unlikely to move that 74 percent back toward 90. What would help is a record, held on the buyer’s side, of what each purchase was approved to produce, how it would be measured, the conditions that had to hold, the evidence the supplier was expected to supply, and how the bids were compared on it. It is written before the request for proposal goes out, travels with it, is referenced in the contract and is checked again at renewal. One form of that document is a Request for Value. The buyer owns it, and it takes the place of the supplier’s model as the reference for the purchase.

With it, the same dashboard that today shows savings can show results, line by line, in the executive’s own terms. Procurement could then answer for results as well as price, and the stakeholders SAP’s research lead describes, the ones with new data and new questions, would find the answers already written down.

A supplier that delivers gains from this too. Its results sit on the record next to a competitor’s promises, and at renewal it can point to evidence the buyer wrote down instead of leaning on the relationship.

For now, most of what the C-suite can see of procurement is a savings line, and this year’s survey suggests that is no longer enough to hold its confidence.

References: Economist Enterprise, supported by SAP, The Procurement Imperative, 2026 report “Procurement at a crossroads: From optimism to realism”, a global survey of 2,648 C-suite executives, fifth edition (insights.economistenterprise.com). SAP News, “Procurement’s New Balancing Act: Cutting Costs, Adopting AI, and Proving Strategic Value”, Gordon Donovan, June 23, 2026.

Keep reading: ACT I · Chapter 2: The Broken Value Flow